


A Tame Hunt

by misura



Category: Hive Mind Series - Janet Edwards
Genre: Background Het, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-16 11:27:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16953141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: Amber investigates a park where some animals have gone missing.





	A Tame Hunt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [burglebezzlement](https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/gifts).



> contents warning: brief and unfounded speculation on the possibility of animal harm in very general terms

Adika looked unhappy. That in itself wasn't unusual, but the cause of his unhappiness was.

Most of the time, things that made Adika unhappy were things that he considered a threat to the precious, irreplaceable telepath (in other words: me) whom it was his job to keep safe. Adika took his job very seriously, which of course was why Lottery had assigned him to it in the first place.

This time, Adika was unhappy for a completely different reason.

_... see why they need a Telepath Unit for something like this. Don't they have Park Keepers for things like that? What a waste of Amber's time._

It appeared a number of animals had gone missing from a park at Level 42. The Park Keepers had been unable to find the cause, which might mean that the animals were being taken by someone, rather than slipping out somehow and, once outside of the park, being unable to find their way back.

Animals, especially birds, did sometimes wander outside of the parks where they were kept. However, as the parks were the only place they would find food, they never stayed away for much longer than a few days.

That was no longer the case here. And so the Park Keepers had requested a telepath to come and take a look around, to see if perhaps they might discover what was going on.

From their point of view, it wasn't an unreasonable request. There were plenty of nosy patrols, after all, doing their job on all levels of the Hive. For one of them to spend some time at the park wouldn't put any particular strain on the Hive's resources.

What the Park Keepers didn't know, and Adika did, was that the Hive only had four true telepaths.

I was one of them, and I was going to make sure that no other animals would disappear.

 

"The person you're looking for is most likely a child," said Lucas. "They might have wanted to spend more time with a particular animal and decided to take it home with them. Their intentions would have been good."

I nodded, a little relieved. I wouldn't be looking for an actual wild bee, who wanted to hurt people or destroy things. I would just be looking for someone who had made a mistake.

"If I'm right, it will make finding them much more difficult," Lucas went on. "Depending on what happened after they had taken the animals, they might still not be aware of having done anything wrong."

Adika scowled. He hadn't much liked Lucas inviting himself along on this run. He felt Lucas might distract me, and while this should be a perfectly safe and normal check run, there was always a chance something would go wrong, and then he would need me to focus on staying alive, rather than worry about my boyfriend.

"However, their parents or caretakers might." Lucas paused. "They might have various reasons for not having reported the incident. Possibly, they thought that they would be able to deal with the issue by themselves."

Another possibility popped up in his mind. I gasped.

Adika tensed. Lucas winced and said, "The chance that we're dealing with someone wishing deliberate harm is very small. I know how much you like animals, so I didn't think that you needed that particular information just yet."

"What kind of person would kill animals?" I asked. I had read the minds of people who'd wanted to kill or hurt other people, but somehow, this felt worse. Animals were harmless. Helpless.

"Lots of people, once upon a time." Lucas was using his Tactical Commander voice, so I didn't even need to read his mind to know that the subject was making him as uncomfortable as it made me. He simply couldn't afford to let it influence his ability to do his job. "For protection, at first. For food, later on, before the development of protein vats and more efficient methods of food production."

I could not imagine anyone raising animals only to kill and eat them, yet that was what Lucas's thoughts were telling me people had been doing, long before the Hive was created. I felt sick.

"This information is not generally available," said Lucas. "Therefore, it's unlikely we're dealing with anything as bad as that. The likeliest option is still a person who is simply misguided and unaware of the consequences of their actions."

The first animal had disappeared three weeks ago. It had been a young rabbit, which was good news, since it might have survived on vegetables, assuming its captor had tried to feed it any.

The second animal to disappear had been a rabbit as well, then a duck, a puppy and another rabbit.

I very much wanted to believe that whomever was responsible kept taking rabbits so that they might keep one another company. However, I couldn't quite shake the worry that they might be replacing the animal they had taken before.

Still, I told myself, there was no point in worrying. I only had to do my job. Then I would know for certain, and whatever might have happened already, at least I could make sure it wouldn't keep happening.

 

There were a lot of children in the park, and of course all of them loved animals. Lucas had been right. On a regular check run, I looked for a wild bee, a mind that was different from those around it.

After a few hours, I decided to switch to the parents. If any of them had found the animals and decided not to return them to the park, surely they would be thinking about what had happened, now that they were here again. Surely they would be worrying about their child trying to take another animal.

_... can't believe he talked me into staying until Feran moved to Teen Level. That's still ..._

_... so bored. Can't she talk about anything other than bob-sledding? Even if I like looking at her ..._

_... but that last song wasn't up to their usual standards at all. I wonder what happened? I hope they're not going to split up. That would be ..._

"Amber is getting tired. We should take a break," said Lucas.

"I can keep going," I protested. I did have a faint headache, but I wasn't so tired yet that I needed to stop.

"Or you can sit down, enjoy a picnic with your amazing boyfriend and then go back to work with fresh energy," said Lucas. His mind teased me with something a little less innocent than a picnic.

I rolled my eyes to show that I was a mature, sensible person who was going to take a break for mature, sensible reasons. Besides, I didn't need to have my hands free to do my job.

"You do need to relax," said Lucas, his tone serious. "You've been working hard. Overdoing things won't help anyone."

"I know," I said, sighing as I sat down.

 

"Eli's suggesting we might find the culprit simply by posting a few members of the Strike team at each exit and having them watch for anyone suspicious," said Adika.

_... not ideal, but at least we could take Amber back to the Unit. And who knows, we might get lucky and catch ..._

"Eli's parents are Park Keepers," Lucas reminded me. His thoughts added that he didn't think it very likely Adika's idea would be successful, because the Park Keepers here would have already tried it, and their experience would have made them much better at spotting unusual behavior.

Adika thought that he didn't really want to waste another day on this run. It was obvious that reading this many minds was wearing on me, and in case of an emergency run, that would be an unacceptable risk. He'd have to ask another Unit to take it, which would involve explaining why he'd allowed his own telepath to exhaust herself on what should have been a regular check run.

On another level, Lucas's thought were much like Adika's, except that he blamed himself for the current state of things.

_... should have considered all the ramifications of the case being about animals instead of people. She's too emotionally involved now, and the profile's too vague for her to do her job. Stupid! She can't read a stolen animal's mind the way she could a kidnapped person's, so the only chance we have is ..._

I laughed. Of course! "Lucas. I could hug you."

Lucas blinked. "Please know that you have my enthusiastic permission to do so any time you want."

"You've thought of something," said Adika.

"Actually, Lucas has thought of something," I said. "All this time, we've been so focused on finding the person taking the animals. Instead, we should have focused on the animals themselves."

"No unusual purchases to suggest animal keeping have been made by anyone in the area surrounding the park. Nor have there been any complaints about noise or smell," said Lucas. "Thus, while flattered, I am also confused."

"We're checking the wrong place." It was true that I couldn't read animals the way I read people. I wouldn't be able to check the park animals's minds for memories of someone acting strangely, or breaking the guidelines.

"Of course we've been checking the wrong place," said Lucas. He grinned. "Human thinking."

Adika still looked confused, so I explained it to him.

"In the park, there are lots of animal minds. Outside of the park though, in people's homes, there are none at all. If the taken animals are being kept somewhere, I should be able to find them fairly easily."

Adika thought a bad word and called Nicole.

 

Two days later, I wondered what I was missing. No other animals had been taken, but that was the only good thing that had happened.

I hadn't found the animals. I hadn't discovered anyone thinking about having taken the animals. I had read what felt like hundreds of minds, but they had all belonged to tame bees, good, hard-working citizens of the Hive, mostly happy and content with their lives.

Under other circumstances, I might have been happy and content myself.

Lucas was thinking that perhaps the animals were dead after all, and how sad that would make me. Pointing out that the animals would have likely been killed as soon as captured, meaning there was nothing I could have done about it wouldn't help me on an emotional level, and it might also cause me to feel even more irrational guilt.

_... can't get out! Can't ..._

I stopped walking, actively reaching for the mind I'd just heard. Even if it was clear that they had nothing to do with the stolen animals, they were still in distress. Also, I realized, perhaps no animal had been taken because the kidnapper had been working their way up to actual people.

A missing child would be reported immediately, but it was possible our kidnapper hadn't realized that. If they truly thought that they were acting for the good of their victims, they might not care, or have told themselves that even if they got caught, they would be able to explain and get away with it.

"Amber?"

"A child," I said. "She's trapped somewhere." I tried to find a clue, a memory of how she'd gotten where she was now. "Somewhere very dark. She - sorry. False alarm." I opened my eyes. "She was only having a bad dream. A memory of something in a bookette. Her father came into the room and woke her."

"Shouldn't have let her read such a scary bookette," said Adika, sounding disapproving, thinking that when _he_ became a father, he'd be taking better care of his children.

"Experiencing scary things in a controlled environment like a bookette can make them less scary in reality," Lucas pointed out. "Also, the right amount of fear can be exciting, even fun."

I didn't need to be a telepath to know that he was talking from personal experience. We'd read the bookette together, about someone needing to go Outside in order to save their Hive from destruction. Along the way, they met people from other Hives, some of whom were friendly, while others were not. At the end of the story, they had travelled all the way to the evil Hive, where they needed to sabotage that Hive's power supply nexus. They thought that they would only be able to accomplish this by sacrificing their own lives, but at the last minute, one of their enemies suddenly showed up and fell into the core, destroying it and thus accidentally saving the world and the heroes' lives.

I hadn't quite understood that last bit of the story, but I'd enjoyed the excitement of being chased by nightmare-ish creatures on ghost-horses, and fighting for my life against monsters trying to kill me. I'd known that I was only in a bookette, and that nothing actually bad could happen to me.

Adika sighed. He was thinking that it would be pointless to argue about this, and also that Lucas probably wasn't going to be a parent for at least ten years, so he couldn't possibly understand.

The girl who'd had the nightmare was sinking back into sleep, her father telling her he was going to leave the door open just a bit, so if anything bad happened, she only had to call, and he and Daddy would be right there, ready to bop any scary monsters right on the head and make them sorry they'd ever tried to scare her.

I sighed in relief. "I know what has happened to the animals."

 

As Lucas had speculated, our culprit's motives had been noble: she'd felt sorry for the animals being 'trapped' in the park, and she'd wanted to 'leave the door open', just as her father did for her.

She hadn't been taking any animals home with her, so the Park Keepers hadn't noticed anything unusual about her. She also hadn't been 'targeting' any specific animals, so it was just coincidence which animal would use her 'door', which was nothing more than a small gap in the fence surrounding the park. She widened it just enough for a small animal to get through when she arrived at the park, which was why all the missing animals had been young ones, and before she left the park, she'd close it again, just as her father would close the door at the beginning of every evening.

"Now all that remains is to track down the missing animals." Adika sounded very happy. Tracking down stray animals was something for the hasties. "Case solved."

"We got lucky," Lucas sounded like he agreed with Adika, but he was actually thinking about all the mistakes he'd made. He didn't want to solve cases through luck. Luck was unreliable.

"You're sure the animals are all right?" I'd been taught that animals were only happy in the parks and would be miserable and die within weeks if taken outside. Caring for animals required special skills and knowledge. An ordinary person might be able to keep an animal alive for a while, but only for a very short while and only in an emergency.

"A dead animal would have been reported," said Lucas. "Most people wouldn't find anything unusual about spotting a living animal, though. They'd naturally assume the animal had wandered out of the park and would return there by itself. Likely, that's what these animals tried to do as well, except that when they returned, the gap in the fence was no longer wide enough to let them in."

He was thinking that once, animals had lived in the same area as people. Some of them had lived in houses, but others had not. Those animals had eventually turned feral and dangerous to humans.

"The Park Keepers will fix the fence, and someone will explain to the girl and her parents why what she did was wrong."

Adika was looking forwards to getting home and seeing Megan. I quickly returned my attention to Lucas. I was happy for Adika and Megan, but I didn't need to see quite that much detail of how happy they made one another, now that they had agreed to be together.

"I want to know when the animals have been found," I said.

"Of course," said Lucas. His thoughts said the same thing. He'd never for a moment assumed that I would be content with only a reassurance, although he'd hoped that it would lift my spirits, maybe put me in a good enough mood to agree to his suggestion to have dinner at my apartment, just the two of us. If I didn't, he'd have to spend the evening writing up his report, which surely was not a fate I, the most delightful and awesome being in the world, would inflict upon him, my adoring boyfriend.

Adika made a disgusted sound. Lucas grinned.

"Let's go home, shall we?" I said.


End file.
